Managing to pull myself out of bed at a decent hour, I began my day by watching the episode of Lost I had been downloading all night. To my horror, I realized that I had forgotten to cap my upload rate before going to bed and subsequently upon waking up, I discovered that I was uploading at something like 1.08 Mb/s. Shit shit shit. What’s worse is that my ratio of that torrent was over 80, which means I had uploaded something in the realm of 30 GB since going to bed. Quadruple shit. Even now a day later, after hearing stories of Dutch ISPs cutting kids off for using too much bandwidth, I’m worried that my internet could blink out at any moment. That doesn’t mean that I’ll stop downloading, though, oh no. If they get me, you can be sure I’ll go down in a blaze of glory.
After finishing what was, naturally, another very exciting episode of Lost, I headed on over to, again, naturally, Bagels & Beans. After chatting with the waiter who’d been there each of my two previous visits about the weather, I ordered an iced coffee. I discovered during my last visit that iced coffee in Amsterdam is not like iced coffee in the U.S. Instead of simply dropping ice cubes into otherwise normal brewed coffee, iced coffee in Amsterdam is rather a more like a coffee flavored shake, though with a much more runny consistency than something like a frappucino. It was, of course, delicious. After punching out Wednesday’s post, I decided to order again. Cool Waiter asked if the iced coffee was as good as last time, and I replied “of course.” I then ordered regular coffee and a goat cheese/bacon/pine nuts bagel. After finishing both of those items, Cool Waiter came by again, and we discussed how, really, the goat cheese has too strong of a flavor to be very good. It overpowers the taste of the bacon and the bagel, which is unfortunate, because it was otherwise very good.
I’ve noticed a number of IES students in B&B since I’ve started frequenting there. I had an awkward encounter with one girl on Wednesday, I knew she was in IES, and I expect she knew that I was too, but we had never talked or really acknowledged each other (even though I’m pretty sure she lives two doors down from me), so we just sat next to each, each doing our own thing. Friday, however, Eliza came by and we had a nice little chat about this and that. I think the cafe’s location in proximity to the school is what brings a lot of IESers by, as it’s a three or four minute bike ride from the ISHSS building to get there.
I do want to branch out a little, so earlier today I began doing research online into other cafes in the area. I’d tried this before without much luck, but I took a different approach this time. I Googled “Bagels & Beans Amsterdam” with the hope I’d find guides to the city that would list places similar to B&B. This strategy ended up working, so in the next few days I’m going to visit The Literary Café and Brandmeester’s, both which seem to be the type of place that I’m looking for. I don’t mean to abandon Bagels & Beans, but I just feel like I should see what else is out there.
After leaving B&B, I headed over to the PHK student apartments to meet with my Film Theory in Practice group. We’re doing a project on broken chronologies / non-linear narratives in film, so we’re watching a different movie each week to analyze. Last night we decided to watch Fight Club, even though I knew it really didn’t have much to offer in terms of non-linearity, something the other group members seemed to be surprised by after the movie ended. I think we each right an individual paper on the the topic, so I think that while they focus primarily on non-linear films as the relate to the mind and memory, I’m going to look at a variety of films that are non-linear in different ways, and discuss how the broken chronology serves the story and themes. I haven’t told them yet, though. Hmm.
I ordered an Indian Chicken Curry Pizza from Liberty Pizza after getting back. It sounded good in theory, but I didn’t really know what to expect. The chicken and curry sauce were both very good and it included pineapple which was unexpected but not disagreeable. Unfortunately, it also included mushrooms, which just really destroyed the pizza for me. It was edible, but I had to go through and pick off the mushrooms, which was just a hassle. I guess I could try being a less picky eater, but really, I’m just not crazy about the idea of eating fungus.
I decided I was going to go to a midnight screening of The Big Lebowski later that night. I checked around to see if other people were interested in going. Nick had plans to check out a couple of clubs, and since Lebowski was playing both Friday and Saturday, I decided to join him. First we went to a Gerrit Rietveld Academy (the art school at UvA) party at the Sugar Factory. Apparently a pretty decent band was supposed to be playing, but when we got there, we discovered that not only was the band disappointingly mediocre, they were also very poorly mixed, making it almost impossible to make out the singer’s lyrics, or anything he was saying, even between songs. We tried to stick it out as long as we could, but eventually decided we better check out Club 8, where they were hosting something called Club Bangkok that specialized in indie-electro-pop, just the type of music we were both looking for.
We got there around 1am, and the place was fairly sparsely populated. The music wasn’t terrible, but there just weren’t nearly enough people there for either of us to really feel comfortable dancing. We went downstairs briefly and spent our last €2,20 playing fifteen minutes of pool that cost €9,50 an hour. It was probably one of the sadder games of pool ever played, though, to my credit, I managed to keep the cue ball on the table this time… After our fifteen minutes ended, we went back upstairs to the dance floor. More people had trickled it, so it was a bit more crowded, but we still stuck to the back and discussed The Wire and such things. They did sample Daft Punk a few times, which was at least somewhat comforting.
When we headed to the coat check shortly thereafter, we found it to be abandoned. Soon though, a girl from the front desk came to help us, grabbing my ass as she passed behind the counter. I’m not sure what was meant by that, although she was very friendly while retrieving our coats for us. I’ll just chalk it up to her being drunk, a safe bet I think. We then biked back to Funen, where I started watching All The President’s Men before turning it off to sleep about halfway through. I love me some Dustin Hoffman (and some Robert Redford, for that matter…).
“The trick is not minding.”
-G. Gordon Liddy
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